


Sons and Daughters

by rashaka



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Captivity, Emotional Manipulation, Episode: s03e22 De-Void, F/M, Gen, Interrogation, Post-Episode: s03e22 De-Void, Psychological Drama, it feels better biting down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 01:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1326541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rashaka/pseuds/rashaka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison interrogates Derek. <i> (here all the bombs fade away)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Sons and Daughters

**Author's Note:**

> Take up your arms, sons and daughters. We will arise from the bunkers. When we arrive, we'll make our homes on the water. 
> 
> post 3x22

In his dreams, Derek hears the humans arguing. Their words flutter in and out of his awareness, like wings in the dark.  
  
 _"Scott should be doing—"_  
  
 _"—after Lydia, and if we can get Derek to snap ou——need him too."_  
  
 _"I don't———he talked about you—"_  
  
 _"But you're the one he——not letting you near him."_  
  
 _"—stays chained up—"_  
  
 _"—when I'm sure."_  
  
Derek comes to with a headache the size of a faultline. It schmisms his mind into disparate sections, each corner trying desperately to process information and pass it on to the next. First concern: breathe in. Now breathe out. Okay, there's a light. A golden luminescene sits just above his vision, forcing away the darkness and crawling beneath his retina to further aggravate the pounding of his skull.  
  
A girl steps into the circle of light and Derek almost climbs out of his steel reinforced chair. Of course, doing that is difficult when one's shackled to the floor. Metal cramps against his wrists and before him the vision of Allison Argent swims into focus.  
  
"Where’s Chris?" he gasps. "I can't. I can’t think."  
  
Allison's doppelganger kneels until she's about level with him. She clicks her tongue, and the sound summons familiar goosebumps to race over Derek's arms. When she replies her voice isn't insidious like Kate's; instead it's an ocean, as flat and immense as a day without wind. Her brown eyes gleam under the light of the hanging lamp, and the expression is all hunter.  
  
"You don’t get to see him. You don’t get to speak to him. Right now, you speak to me."  
  
He shakes his head, checking side to side, but it's hard to see. The room feels empty, but everything bleeds together in his peripheral vision. He licks his lips, using the tactile feel of the gesture to concentrate until he can put his words in the right order. "I don't...Something's going on. Why are you doing this?"  
  
"What do you remember last?"  
  
Derek forces his eyes shut. He has to think. He has to keep her talking. "Nothing. I don't remember anything."  
  
"Where were you?"  
  
Eyes still closed, he says, "Home. I was at home, talking to Peter."  
  
When Allison's heartbeat speeds up Derek opens his eyes, but her face remains guileless and void. The world is shaking less, and to stabilize it more he focuses on the hollow of her throat. It moves when she speaks, her symmetrical jawline and pale cheeks a picture of lethal art. He should focus on the floor, or the wall, but as sick as it is he's never been able to look away from those features.  
  
"Why were you talking to Peter?" she asks. He blinks so rapidly his sight blurs, and it's a different woman asking the question. The faultline shudders and he forces his brain to reorient until up is up again and down is down. He can't let her steer the conversation completely.  
  
"Allison, why did you capture me? You’re not supposed to be like her." Fuck.The words still slip out as if he can't control his tongue. Has she drugged him? That seems wrong, but he's cuffed, imprisoned, injured. Every bitter emotion competes for attention, and Derek can't stop himself from repeating it: "You're not like her. I was sure you weren’t like her."  
  
Allison takes a pace, then another. A pendulum, and he counts every step.   
  
"Only one of us has been tormenting people today, Derek. You attacked my father and poured lighter fluid on him. I need to know what happened." She circles his chair, leans over his shoulder, and whispers into his ear. "Try to remember. Remember what happened this afternoon. If you're back to your senses, I’ll let you go. If it's not, we'll try something else."  
  
How we become our mothers and fathers, he thinks. "Are you going to torture me, Allison?"  
  
"Are you going to light me on fire, Derek?"  
  
He's unprepared for the revulsion that swamps him at hearing the accusation from someone else. "No," he gasps. "I wouldn’t—"  
  
But he would. Because he remembers doing it, and he remembers liking it.  
  
The lighter. Argent's panicked face. The chemical _drip drip dripping_ on the floor. A thousand flies buzzed inside him and all he wanted was to burn out the voices completely.  
  
"There it is." Her voice goes soft, and she leans close. Under the grease and the sweat Allison smells like citrus bathsoap. He tries to isolate the scent, to use it as a tether while she urges him: "You’re remembering, Derek. Tell me."  
  
"I..." He tests his chains, flexing his arms so they pull against his skin. Facing him again, so close it's unnerving, Allison puts one hand down above his shackled wrist and rubs small, warm circles into his arm.  
  
"Talk to me. Tell me about Peter."  
  
"It wasn't Peter. It was the nogitsune. It got inside me, like it was doing my thinking for me. I couldn't tell us apart."  
  
"Tell me what it told you."  
  
Derek's stare refocuses on the hollow of Allison's throat, but his mind floats up and out of himself. The soft circling of her thumb on his skin grounds him. Soaking in that minute human contact, Derek brings himself back to that furious place, but this time he separates what the nogitsune had forced on him and what horrors had been his own invention.  
  
"I kept seeing my mom burning up. I know that's wrong, because I wasn’t there that night. But I _was_ , like I could see them right in front of me dying. She trapped my little brother. My two cousins and their parents. Cora was screaming and Kate was standing right there laughing at me. She kept touching me and laughing."  
  
Allison’s stroking finger stops abruptly. She puts both hands over the steel binding him and presses down to stop the shaking in his arms. "Listen to me," she whispers. Her breath is so close, and the divide in Derek's head narrows until it's a thin, dark line.  
  
"Derek, _listen to my voice_. Cora is alive."  
  
He follows the line up, up, up to the surface. Up to words he wants so badly to be true.  
  
"Cora's alive, remember? You sent her to South America two weeks ago. She never burned."  
  
He sounds out the idea. "Never."  
  
"She's safe. Kate never touched her."  
  
"Safe." Derek swallows a deep gulp of air and repeats it like a mantra in his mind. _Cora's alive. She's safe. Kate never touched her. She's safe._  
  
He slumps in the steel chair, letting his bones go slack and closing his eyes against the overhead lamp.  
  
"Remember as much as you can, Derek, please. It could be important. What did the nogitsune tell you to do?"  
  
"I had to make you both pay for what you did to my family." He stops, and changes his reply. "No—for what Kate did. But it had to _be_ you."  
  
Allison's reply is rapid-fire, once more interrogational. "Why us? Why not Gerard?"  
  
"It wanted you, it hated you, so Chris had to burn. It was important you suffer like I suffered."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I don’t know!" he snaps. "It wasn't me!"  
  
"Okay," she accepts. "So think harderer. What _happened_ when you came to my apartment?"  
  
"I got your dad alone. I tied him up and…Oh my god." He trails off, then his whole body jerks in the chair. Allison jumps backward, startled to see his breathing skyrocket and his eyes flash the color of an unnatural sky.  
  
"Derek..."  
  
The chair's metal frame screetches against heavy chain as Derek tries to pull himself in every direction at once.  
  
"Oh my god. Oh my _god_."  
  
His chest heaves and he can't think beyond a new terror climbing through his spine. He has to explain—he has to apologize—but there's gaps in his memory and all he can see is the flame dancing between himself and Chris Argent. The heat gets closer and closer until—"No. I didn't mean it, I'm sorry!"  
  
"Derek, calm down. Derek!"  
  
"I’m sorry. I killed him. Oh my god, I'm sorry Allison, I'm sorry!"  
  
"DEREK, NO! He’s alive!" Two warm hands grab his cheeks and force his head up until he's trapped by a dark, all-consuming gaze. Her low, commanding voice fills the room.  
  
"He’s _alive_. You didn't do it."  
  
When his expression breaks she does something Kate would never: Allison wraps her arms around Derek's shoulders and presses his face to her stomach. His half-sob, half-growled breathing muffles into her shirt. She repeats the assurance as many times as she has to until he quiets.  
  
"My dad is alive, Derek. You didn't kill anyone."  
  
Allison touches the top of his head, then the hair on his neck and finally steps back. His attention follows her, but he's in the chair and she is not. Amidst the profound relief, he has to remind himself that Allison's comfort is not to be trusted. It's not permanent. This is still an interrogation.  
  
As if reading his thoughts, she urges, "Derek, tell me what happened next."  She's always saying his name, he reflects. His mother used to do that, when she wanted the truth.  
  
Derek can't look at her as he says the rest. All the broken pieces are starting to fit together now, and the crevasse in his memory closes.  
  
"I remember pouring the accelerant on him. I had to get him ready for when you got there. I was supposed to wait for you to come home and see it, just you, but it was so confusing. Like a permanent nightmare where the nogitsune was granting me a wish that I never asked for. It wanted me to enjoy it. I think your dad broke his chair and pulled a gun. He was gonna shoot me. Did he shoot me?"  
  
When Allison shakes her head, he asks, "Why not?"  
  
"Because you weren’t yourself. He doesn’t want to hurt you, Derek. Our family is done with hurting yours."  
  
He licks his lips. Chapped, as usual, and he could taste blood in the back of his mouth. "Is he okay?"  
  
"He’s fine. You made a mess and he's probably on his third shower by now. But he's taken a lot worse. Maybe some part of you was trying not to do it."  
  
"Maybe," Derek says. "I don’t remember what happened after the gun."  
  
Pacing again, she fills in the rest. "Scott and Lydia broke the nogitsune’s hold on Stiles. We think that severed the connection to you, Isaac, and the twins. My dad said you got a nosebleed then dropped like a rock."  
  
"Are they tied up here too?"  
  
"No."  
  
"How long do I have to be here?"  
  
Allison lets out a sigh, and puts her hands on her hips. "Well, are you going to hurt anyone else?"  
  
Derek figures he ought to seriously consider the question. "I don’t want to," he decides.  
  
"What about the twins?"  
  
"Okay, maybe some people."  
  
"Are you going to hurt my dad?"  
  
"No."  
  
With a half-shrug that sends her hair over her shoulder, Allison asks, "And me?"  
  
"Seems inevitable."  
  
"What? Was that a joke?"  
  
Rolling his head on his neck, Derek takes a deep breath, gives a hard yank on his chains, and says, "Can I go home now, Allison?"  
  
She exhales. "Yeah. I guess so."  
  
Allison takes a key off her belt and unlocks shackles binding his wrists to the arms of the steel chair. As she removes the first metal ring, her hands encircle his wrist for a moment, expertly massaging the blood flow back to normal. She then sets it down and moves to the other hand. The gesture is intimate, but professional as well. That this whole embarassing interrogation has yeilded the only comforting human touch Derek has experienced in the weeks is just a sad fact of his life lately.  
  
He wonders if Chris Argent's daughter was trained to do this after an interrogation, like some kind of psychological cool down trick. Or did the same chains once bind her to a chair, leaving her skin inflamed and bruised?  
  
 _Most of them it takes hours. For others, seconds._  
  
When Allison backs away Derek finally stands, tracking her toward the room's only door.  
  
"Hey."  
  
He touches her elbow and Allison freezes. Her skin is soft under the pads of his fingers but her whole body sways like a trigger wire. Undaunted, Derek challenges her with a stare. He says nothing, content to wait as their breathing evens out and they watch each other in silence.  
  
What does she see when she looks at him? He just tried kill her father, yet Allison takes off the chains and blithely turns her back to him. She's really kind of a terrible hunter, by traditional measure. Always going places without back up. Getting involved in Druid magic. Making friends with the enemy.  
  
Dating werewolves and trusting people just because they promise to be trustworthy.  
  
He almost opens his mouth to tell her so, but reconsiders when her eyes dip and raise again. Allison's breath hitches, her heartbeat suddenly picks up, and Derek drops his hand like he's been touching fire. She pivots and throws open the door to freedom.  
  
"Come on," Allison says. "The fight's not over yet." 


End file.
